


Glory, Glory

by midnightflame



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Astral Plane, Astral Projection, Home, Implied Relationships, Introspection, M/M, Mentions of Death, Season 6 Spoilers, Unrealized Feelings, Yearning, coming to terms with mortality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-15
Updated: 2018-06-15
Packaged: 2019-05-23 21:38:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14941838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midnightflame/pseuds/midnightflame
Summary: Shiro has endless tracks of space and time to wander, to figure out what it means to exist and not exist, what home means and how to get back there.





	Glory, Glory

**Author's Note:**

> Like so many who watched, season 6 thoroughly kicked around my heart and yet made me love this series even more. I feel so much for Shiro in all of this and everything in those last few episodes just broke my damn heart for him. So, I had to write. Just something quick to pour some thoughts and feelings out with.
> 
> And as always feel from to come yell at me over [on twitter](https://twitter.com/ByMidnightFlame) (beware some S6 spoilers right now!)
> 
> [And enjoy this song for some good Sheith](https://open.spotify.com/track/76mEYfJAzEZzMM8FfbF1Op)

He is drowning in a mirror of stars. They twinkle all around him, like prayer candles for the fallen or the dreams that haven’t quite been forgotten by fading hearts. And no one ever tells you about that, about how one can drown in hope and good deeds, about how the best intentions in the world can swallow you down with all the finesse of a great white shark. 

There one minute and then gone. 

Is it possible to deliver life from the depths of nothingness itself?

Shiro glances above. The stars glimmer back at him. The sky shifts from midnight blue to a nebulous purple-black (it’s the sort of sky you pull dreams from when you look up and tell yourself _one day_ ). And the horizon reaches on until forever, and like time itself, surpasses even that until endless seems almost minuscule in comparison to its reach. On and on and on it goes, filled with silence and starlight and the very essence of him. 

He is here, and here has no name or definition, but it is a place as familiar to him as the callouses over his hands had once been, or the smile over a particular pair of lips when they welcomed him back home.

Whoever thought home could become such an abstract concept. Shiro wonders when he stopped thinking of it as brick and mortar, with enough bedrooms for two, a kitchenette almost too tiny to be comfortably called cozy, with a place to park a hoverbike and enough desert to make you forget the rest of the world existed. Maybe that was the fallacy all along, thinking that home was always a place, locked to the ground and while waiting for your return, filled itself with cobwebs and memories. 

Standing here now, home has never felt so far away to him. But he imagines it, in the promises of great things to come, in the quiet of sitting side-by-side with near empty cans of Coke at their feet and a handful of words held on equally quiet tongues. He sees it in the way blue-grey could turn violet in the rose-golds of sunset. He hears it in the challenge to everything he was and said, this idea of home starting to realize that it could exist outside of his shadow. 

He feels it in the weight of a shoulder against his own, filling the hollows of the nights around him.

Shiro curls his fingers towards his palm. There’s no tension, no warmth, no life. An empty action of a man not quite empty. Bereft of a few things, maybe the most important things some might argue, but still somewhere.

Lost in a Somewhere that felt like Nowhere.

*

Is this Heaven?

He’s asked himself this a number of times. A number because he’s lost count and after a certain point, a number is just a number that only you rightly know the weight of anymore. But he thinks a place as wonderful as that - the light-saturated and hallowed grounds of Heaven - would not be so empty. Or silent. The stars, it turns out, are rather poor conversationalists. They tinkle, and they chime, and they glitter like a starlet’s grandest desires but they have no answers, and they have no real hope. 

_Hallelujah_ is what the angels were supposed to have sung. 

But he is standing here, on a lake made of glass and stellar reflections, breathing in like it still means something, like it still makes him human. (There’s no air here, just like he has no tangible form to anchor himself to, no better than a ship without a harbor or a heart without a home.) And there is only silence, running on and on and on until that too becomes just another number sitting heavy at the back of his mind. 

When he takes a step, there are no rippling waves blurring out the clouds and starlight drifting under his feet. Everything exists apart from him. He is a nomad in another’s land, without effect on its landscape, not even able to scrawl his name across its surface. 

_Hallelujah_ is what his lips form, sung silently for a universe he knows is still listening.

They don’t like to talk about that either. Not anymore. About how war bleeds dreams and innocence from Youth. They don’t talk about a lot of things. Particularly here. 

Maybe there’s nothing worth talking about anymore. At least maybe not in this place where the past is nothing more than death-hymns carved in long-eroded obelisks.

Has it been days? Months? Years?

Another number to throw on the scales. One of these days they’re going to tip. 

For now, though, Shiro turns his head to the sky, and he counts the stars like sheep until the sheep turn into lambs, and sleep never comes.

*

The world keeps moving.

That’s something Shiro becomes acutely aware of in this expanse of night and silence that’s not quite so silent. Life flickers into existence, no more than a breath’s worth, as tenuous as rope frayed down to its last few fibers. He tries to grasp at it at times. 

Always a close call, the ones never quite close enough for salvaging. 

But he can hear the world at times, microthreads of thought that spill from a legendary beast. He begins to start up conversations with her. There’s never any reply, but there’s something in the knowledge that someone somewhere might be listening. It’s what gets your heart sighing in relief, not unlike Pandora’s must have at the sight of Hope still fluttering at the bottom of a box of horrors. So, Shiro talks and tries to tune himself into the world that’s learned how to exist without him.

The real him.

Talks about the things that, like cobwebs spinning out their own story-laced existences, clutter up a home he’ll likely never see again. He talks about how he’d like to see home again. He spills memories with the same liberal freedom a child pours sugar into morning tea, recounting all the things he hopes he will never forget. Because he’s not certain about this place. 

Because maybe if you live in Nowhere long enough, Nowhere becomes you too.

Without memories to serve as waymarks, how could he possibly claim to be Takashi Shirogane? He would simply become another star, twinkling on about empty hopes and never having a thing to say to anyone anymore. See, that’s what happens when you exist in nothingness for too long. 

You forget. You end up forgotten. You forget that you were ever forgotten.

So, Shiro talks about home. He goes on about the dreams he had, and how he envisioned a life outside of all of this. He talks about how there’s someone out there who has the ability to do what he’s done and to possibly do it better. (And he smiles at those words, always, no matter how many times he says them, because there is truth in the light of them, and he feels like he can see a little better by the glow of _his_ potential.) He talks about the past. He talks about the present. He talks about his hopes for the future though he knows they lay as dormant as he himself is at this moment. 

And he starts to listen when the pleas come in. Until there’s one that breaks his heart because it sounds like home calling out to him and he has only one voice to answer it. 

“I told you he would become great,” Shiro says, staring up at the sky. 

The stars still glimmer. The clouds still drift through purple-haze. And suddenly, he’s not so alone anymore.


End file.
